I recent release from Anton du Preez comes through with a wonderful emotional drive and this sense of honesty that gives you a lot of what the artist is about as a person as he wears his heart on his sleeves and delivers something that has a cinematic backbone and comes through impactful.
The Songs of Feeling album is detailed and has such descriptions of his love, loss, feelings, and situations that it's almost like these songs serve as chapters in the artist's life, and only by listening to the whole album where you get the full picture.
It's outstanding how Anton can articulate those emotions into words and music this way because everything feels so lush with gorgeous instrumentation like huge string sections and all this orchestrated atmosphere that you can just get engulfed in the entire thing so quickly.
This record was most likely cathartic for Anton to write and release and a lot of these songs end up feeling so relatable and understandable that some of them can actually feel like they serve as the soundtrack to a certain chapter in your own life and that connectivity stay strong throughout the record somehow.
Everything on this was so gracefully performed and Anton's vocals are passionate and powerful a lot of the time while he swells and sways with the intensities of the songs so everything feels so alive and breathing rather than cookie-cutter.
This album has an almost theatrical to it and it is certainly an amazing escape from your everyday reality because you're able to take yourself away from your surroundings and step into someone else's emotionally charged world for a chunk of time.
This in itself is sort of like a gift and certain tracks do stand out as singles but all of them can almost be a single so listening to the album from beginning to end is the only real way to soak it in the way it was meant to be.
I adore this factor because I feel like we do live in a little bit too much of a single-based society these days and people like Anton release not just full-length albums but an album that has a meaning and a purpose, messages to display, and emotions to release is very important.
This was an incredibly wonderfully woven record and there was certainly plenty of attention to detail during the creation of these songs because again, they are orchestrated with major instrumentation a lot of the time, but it never loses that heart and it never loses that character that it starts with or that it was born from in the first place and that may be the most important aspect of the whole thing.
Anton certainly has a love for his craft and uses his musical abilities to get things off of his chest and send messages, and the songs that he puts out there have these purposes either for himself or for others that people can relate to and draw from.
This is the kind of music we need a lot more of out there in the world in general and I will be keeping a close eye on Anton du Preez to see what he releases next.
Take some of your time out to listen to this record whether it's a drive in the car, sitting on the couch with headphones on, or whatever because it's well worth your time especially if you like music that makes you feel.
I'm going to give this a 9 out of 10 for everything from composition to arrangement, to performance, to orchestration, and its authenticity in songwriting.